Qualcomm released a new top-tier smartphone chip that was designed to be used in premium-priced Android phones, with features like sharper photos and graphics than phones with chips from rivals.
The San Diego, California-based company is the biggest supplier of chips at the heart of many Android phones, competing against rivals such as Taiwan's MediaTek Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which uses Qualcomm chips in some of its phones but self-supplies chips for some models.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip is expected to have similar computing cores to rivals like MediaTek, which announced this month a chip aimed at premium phones. Nearly every other part of the chip is designed by Qualcomm, including those that play a role in the visual quality of photos and graphics-intensive apps like games.
The company has been crafting software that will let handset makers tap deeper into the parts of the chip, according to mobile, compute and infrastructure for Qualcomm.
It's not just saying, I've got the biggest CPU and I can hit a benchmark that lasts one minute, Katouzian told Reuters in an interview. We have all these capabilities, but it's really about the user experience. More than a dozen phone makers - including Xiaomi Corp, Sony Group Corp and Honor - the brand spun out of Huawei Technologies Group Ltd - have signed up to use the new chips and that phones featuring it will be on the market by the end of the year, according to Qualcomm.